2004
The Illinois Negro Code
Most people believe the history of race relations in the United States is neatly divided by geography. Those states north of the Mason-Dixon Line were paragons of equality and liberty, where race was not an issue and diversity flourished in all its glory. In the benighted states to their south, however, the entire social structure was based on slavery and racist oppression. Consequently, the War Between the States was fought purely over the issue of slavery, and, as is usual in trial by combat, the arms of the virtuous side were strengthened by the Hand of the Almighty, which led to their victory over those rebellious slaveholding cretins. For some unknown reason, the books written by court historians do not start with the words “once upon a time.”
In reality, things were much different, as the history of Illinois demonstrates.
But, thou Bethlehem . . . —December 2004
PERSPECTIVE
The Plight of the Homeless
by Thomas Fleming
Life in the Unreal City.
VIEWS
Finding Eden
by Hugh Barbour, O.Praem.
The paradise of fools and its King.
At Home in the Cosmos
by John Francis Nieto
Dante versus the modern imagination.
Taxation for Economic Survival: The Business Transfer Tax
The severity of the ongoing decline of U.S. manufacturing has placed our prosperity and national security in jeopardy. A principal cause of this crisis is the federal tax code, which currently imposes multiple layers of progressive taxation on U.S. goods.
The Plight of the Homeless
In one of Douglas Adams’ very silly books, Zaphod Beeblebrox, the egocentric two-headed president of the universe, is condemned to undergo the ordeal of the Total Perspective Vortex. It is an excruciating form of torture that exposes the criminal to a sense of the infinite size of the universe and his own small place in it. The result is the annihilation of the self. The device was designed by a scientist who got tired of his wife telling him to put things in perspective. The nagging wife might just as well have been Adam Smith or William Godwin or any one of the liberal philosophers who insist that we look at ourselves as an impartial spectator or extraterrestrial would.
Trick or Trick!—November 2004
PERSPECTIVE
Where’s Joe McCarthy When You Need Him?
by Thomas Fleming
The misadventures of Douglas Feith.
VIEWS
A Third Way?
by Tom Piatak
When stupid and evil are the same.
Toward Real Conservatism
by Edward A. Olsen
Just say no to the neocons.
America for Sale
The recent U.S. recession, if judged by its effect on total employment, was the shortest and mildest of the post-World War II period. In the six months from the peak of July 1998 to the low of January 1999, employment declined by only 1.43 million workers, and, by May 2004, 7.5 million additional workers were employed.
A Third Way?
I went into the 2000 presidential campaign an enthusiastic supporter of Pat Buchanan’s bid for the White House as a third-party candidate. I emerged more convinced than ever that Buchanan would have made an outstanding president but skeptical that a serious right-wing party will be able to emerge, at least in the short run.
I knew that no major national party had emerged since the Republican Party was formed in the 1850’s, helped along by the implosion of the Whig Party and the increasingly sharp divide between North and South. I knew, too, that the most successful of all third-party candidacies, Teddy Roosevelt’s in 1912, accomplished little beyond the election of Woodrow Wilson.
Where’s Joe McCarthy When You Need Him?
Many Americans are so disappointed with the Bush administration that they are tempted to vote for John Kerry. Some Democrats who spent the past 80 years waiting for the Revolution to blow over may think theirs is still the party of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion,” as it was dubbed in 1884, but, by the 1960’s, the Democrats had become the party not of the three R’s but of the three S’s: Sex, Socialism, and Sedition, the enemies of every decent thing this country had ever done or stood for. How did the party of William Jennings Bryan and Al Smith turn into the party of Bill Clinton and Barney Frank?
Smearpolitik
After several weeks of fulminating about John Kerry’s war record and the medals he presumably awarded himself, at least some veterans of the Stupid Party eventually got down to the real point about the man who wants to replace George W. Bush in the White House. Amazingly, it was none other than the forgotten Robert Dole—himself something of a war hero from World War II and whose wounds were far more serious than any Mr. Kerry has even claimed to have suffered—who seems to have been the only man in the GOP to grasp that point.
America: From Village to Empire—October 2004
PERSPECTIVE
The Call of Blood
by Thomas Fleming
Old Europe versus the New World Order.
VIEWS
There Once Was a New England
by John Willson
Timothy Dwight’s New England catechism.
Tocqueville’s America and America Today
by Claude Polin
Liberty, Equality, Materialism.
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